Author

Tags

Share article

Budapest (MTI) – The government takes the “attack” by Brussels on Hungary’s “national consultation”, a survey of citizens, seriously and will soon provide a detailed response to its criticisms, a government spokesman said on Sunday.

Bence Tuzson, state secretary for government communications, told public radio that there were disingenuous and mendacious statements in the European Commission letter in connection with the survey.

He insisted that Brussels had dishonestly failed to mention its decision to enforce a permanent migrant quota system.

On the topic of energy policy, Tuzson said that Brussels claimed that competition drove prices downwards, whereas between 2010 and 2015 electricity prices had risen by an average of 20 percent between 2010 and 2015 and gas prices had gone up even more.

This is not the path that Hungary wants to take in the future, he said.

On the subject of foreign-financed NGOs, the state secretary said that a European parliamentary committee had come to the conclusion that investigations of NGOs should be more stringent.

Tuzson insisted that the true aim of the attacks by Brussels was to influence the outcome of the survey by persuading as many people as possible not to send their questionnaires back. He added that so far around 900,000 people had done so and this indicated that interest in the consultation was high.